You left the hospital on a Friday. Having not seen daylight in nearly a month, you squinted, dipped your head, gave your eyes time to adjust.
Mom told me how she helped you to the car. How, on the drive home, she stopped at the farmstand for Cortland apples, your favorite. The air felt cooler, the leaves beginning to reveal their harvest colors. Sepia, amber, crimson, gold. You watched the horizon as you rode along, everything blurry and jumbled. Like melted crayons on a paper sky.
At home, you felt relieved to see your bed, your favorite mug, your worn-out wool slippers. You sat on the front porch looking out over your garden, now full of weeds. Dandelions and thistle where the zucchini used to be. Crabgrass instead of peas.
For years, you plotted every inch of that garden. Saved cardboard egg cartons and ordered seed packets from a catalog. Tiny white envelopes of hope. When the last frost finally passed over the hills of western Maine, you carried those cartons full of seedlings out to the back yard and transferred each sprout into the soil, making tidy rows. Cucumbers, peppers, rhubarb, radishes. Week after week, you watched the plants unfurl their deep-green leaves, stretching toward the sun.
Some summer evenings, I joined you out there to help water and weed. You acted like it was just another chore, one more thing that needed doing after a long day of cutting leather in the shoe factory, but we both knew there was no place you’d rather be. Knees on the ground. Fingers in the soil. Weeds pulled and tossed aside. Our reward: two beefsteak tomatoes, sprinkled generously with salt and eaten straight, like apples, at the kitchen counter.
The garden went fallow the year you got sick. The year doctors said there was nothing they could do. The year hospice nurses started coming. The year you asked, “What comes next?” and told us you were scared.
You died on a Friday. Late at night, while I was on a plane hurdling up the eastern seaboard. The summer sky an empty black oval outside the airplane window. When we landed, my cellphone dinged with a voicemail from Mom. It’s too late, she said. “Daddy died,” though neither one of us had ever called you daddy.
The next morning, when I got to your house, your body was already gone. Your hospital bed already stripped. I sat on the porch, put my feet in your slippers, wrapped my hands around your mug. I squinted into a new dawn, to the place where the tomatoes used to grow.
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Wendy Fontaine’s work has appeared in American Scholar, Jet Fuel Review, Sweet Lit, Short Reads, Under the Sun and elsewhere. She has received nonfiction prizes from Identity Theory, Hunger Mountain and Tiferet Journal, as well as nominations to the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthologies. A native New Englander, she currently resides in southern California and serves as the flash editor at Hippocampus Magazine. Find her online at wendyfontaine.com or on Bluesky @wendyfontaine.
© 2026, Wendy Fontaine
Halfway Down the Stairs 